Tarot Cards
A Card is a moderately common type of item which provides a special effect upon activation. Cards come with various properties: * They are stored in the upper right item slot, used by pressing "Q" and are one-time-use only. * You may only carry one card or pill at a time. Attempting to pick up a second card or pill will cause you to drop the one you've been previously holding. *There are two types of cards in The Binding of Isaac: "Tarot Cards" and "Suit Cards".1 **"Suit Cards" are only found in Wrath of The Lamb. Similarly to Soul Hearts having a small chance to spawn instead of regular Hearts, they act like a special replacement for Tarot Cards, and have a 20% chance of spawning instead. * * Unlike Pills, a particular type of card will always have the same effect. However, all tarot cards share the same icon, and therefore cannot be identified until picked up. ** Suit cards use a separate icon. :1 Note that these are unofficial names. Technically, The Joker does not have any suit color. Acquisition *Spawned in rooms upon completion. *Found in chests (both locked and unlocked, but not in red chests) *Potential drop from enemies in their Champion Form. *Reward from a Beggar.CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC *Reward from Slot Machines and Fortune Telling Machines. **Might also drop when a machine is blown up. **Only Fortune Telling Machines can provide Suit Cards. *Offered in the Shop for 5 coins (3 coins on discount). **Notice that you won't know which one of the 22 Tarot Cards you will get for your money. **It will always be a Tarot Card, you won't find a Suit Card in the shop. *The Deck of Cards, a spacebar item. **Again, Suit Cards cannot be acquired from here. *The Ace of Spades trinket increases the chance of finding cards. **It also considerably increases the chance of getting Suit Cards instead of Tarot Cards. List Bugs The Tower card will sometimes appear with the wrong Roman numeral, namely XVI the number of Temperance. It still has the same graphic and name otherwise. Trivia *A Tarot Deck is a traditional deck of playing cards with 78 cards from the mid-15th century. Unlike a standard 52-card deck, the Aces are usually replaced by pip cards with the number 1. In addition, it also contains four suit cards with a Knight that ranks between the Jack and the Queen, as well as 21 trump cards with numerals from 1 to 21, as well as the Fool, which is unnumbered. **Divinatory tarot originates from this. Here the 21 trump cards and The Fool are called the Major Arcana, while the remaining cards with the regular suits are called Minor Arcana. Cards from the Major Arcana are the most significant cards for divination. ***The "Tarot" cards in The Binding of Isaac are all of the Major Arcana cards from Divinatory tarot. *The tarot cards featured in The Binding of Isaac are likely based on the Tarot of Marseille and the Rider-Waite tarot, two of the most well-known divinatory tarot decks: The drawings on the tarot cards in The Binding of Isaac seem to be based on the art from Tarot de Marseille. However, this deck does not give a numberal to The Fool, and traditionally uses different names for some cards, also omitting for the thirteenth card entirely (XIII Death in-game). Tarot card names in the game are identical to the Rider tarot, and in this deck, The Fool is indexed with a latin 0. **The card The Star is called "XVII The Star's'" in-game. **Like most traditional or divinatory decks, these tarot decks do not use the more well-known modern French suits (Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs) in the Minor Arcana. Instead, it uses Italian tarot suits: Swords, Cups, Pentacles, and Wands. ***Therefore, the cards added in Wrath of the Lamb (the four pip cards with the number 2 and the joker) are not part of the Rider-Waite deck. Instead, they seem to be part of a standard-52 card deck ("French Deck") with Jokers, used for playing games like Canasta, Rummy, or Poker. The same goes for the trinket Ace of Spades. (The Ace of Spades is one of the highest-ranking cards in many games that use the French Deck.) ****This might be the reason why they cannot be acquired by activating the Deck of Cards item, which represents a divinatory tarot deck. ****The fact those cards from Wrath of The Lamb are not Tarot Cards becomes the most obvious when one compares 0 The Fool with The Joker, since they are the analogy of each other in the respective deck. Furthermore, The Fool is presumably the precursor of all Jokers, which can be considered the most famous type of wild card these days. Category:Items